Reich Marshal of the Belkan Reich

RM Vol 3: For a World without Boundary – Interlude: Enemy at the gate! (Part 3)

Pointing his rifle ahead of the military formation with one hand, the Colonel shouts.

"FOR HIS MAJESTY THE KING OF SWEDEN! CHARGE!"

"CHARGE!"

The entire military formation speeds forward, shouting a large enough battle cry that pierces through the fog of war, reaching as far as the city of Stockholm itself.

There's no speech, no elegance in the march of steel, rubber, and hooves. They barely have enough time to utilize the wind and set a smokescreen to cover up their advance even. Any embellishment, or redundancy, is left behind. What remains are just the men at arms, enough munition to last one day, and the things that they ride to battle. No flowery words, just a boisterous battle cry to hype themselves up and to rattle the weathered spirit of the enemy. Sweden may have been peaceful during the conflicts spanning Europe at large, but it doesn't mean that their warrior root is dead and gone.

Still, they would have loved to get something newer than a tankette or a bolt-action rifle. There are not enough submachine guns to pass around. Riding horses is pretty much a dead sentence against a machine gun emplacement too. Nonetheless, it would be something that they will have to deal with in the future. For now, they will have to make do with what they have.

By using rifle-launched smoke grenades, the Colonel manages to deploy a covering curtain that stretches for a fair bit of distance. This will help his men, especially those on horses, to not be targeted directly by enemy small arms fire for a while. The closer they can get to the Sardegnians, the more pressure they can output. An enemy under pressure tends to make mistakes much easier than normal.

Disclaimer, rifle-launched smoke grenades, when fired in a direction, leave behind a trail of obfuscating smoke in a line. Having used numerous such grenades, a thick smoke screen has been deployed ahead of Sweden's assault formation.

The Colonel makes his moves not a moment too late. Right at that moment the assault formation takes off, hidden by the smoke, the Sardegnians react by firing their precious few howitzers. The enemy commander knows immediately that an attack is about to be launched on the harbor due to the smokescreen. Rather than letting them get too close without doing anything, he orders indiscriminate firing at the possible enemy locations. It's a standard reactionary move, albeit one of very limited effectiveness in practice. By the time the shells landed, the Sweden Colonel and his men had been long gone from their former staging area.

While destruction is brought upon the innocent town, there's not a single fatality register, only some light to moderate injuries, and these belong to Swedish soldiers who are unlucky enough to be hit by shrapnels. The swift evacuation of the townspeople has aided in lessening the casualties the Swedish has incurred. There's also the fact that the Sardegnians have been placed in a disadvantageous position. First of all, they do not know the lay of the land, and they're working out of subpar civilian maps. Second, their artillery pieces and shells have been affected negatively by the poor storage conditions in a long, arduous journey to get to Stockholm's outskirts. Finally, they don't even get the chance to perform range finding for their guns. As a result of multiple reasons, the accuracy of the shells is highly suboptimal. The smoke screen surely doesn't help them determine the effectiveness of their shelling. By the time they manage to gain some semblance of vision of the Sweden attackers, they have arrived close enough for the tankettes and armored cars to start opening up.

The roaring of machine guns fire, the popping sound of autocannons, the battle cry of cavalrymen and motorized infantry... Everything, all at once, has drowned out the exclamation, the surprised screaming of the Sardegnians. They're unlucky, these Sardegnians. Having chosen a dilapidated harbor as their landing area, they have no solid cover to hide behind. Moss-covered wooden panels and rusty door frames aren't anything great to block supersonic bullets, much less explosive-filled shells from an autocannon. With their positions being torn apart rapidly, the Sardegnians can barely muster up any resistance. The few machine guns they have in their hands, even when placed behind hastily constructed barricades, aren't really enough to put a dent in the Swedish charge.

The Colonel's force is spread out into two rows. The first row consists of tankettes and armored cars, utilizing their protected nature to take any damage head-on. The second row is made up of the trucks and horses, with them taking potshots at areas that the fighting vehicles aren't suppressing. From a spectator's perspective, the withering fire coming from the Swedish side shredded the Sardegnian frontline barely a minute after the first bullet was fired. It's surprisingly effective, and overall cathartic to see firsthand, even if some of the images are quite visceral.

Other than striking at the enemy's position with the grace of a hammer hitting an anvil, a medical extraction team has been following behind the Colonel's group. Their reason for deployment has been to recover the group of negotiators that was casualties in the opening phase of the battle. Miraculously, a few of them, including the Colonel's advisor, are still alive. That said, they are in critical condition. As such, they are rushed into ambulances to be extracted back to a qualified hospital.

Moving away from matters that have been left behind, the attacking force, other than some injuries due to grazing shots or lucky hits, is undeterred in their assault. Smashing apart the ruined defense line of the Sardegnians, the armored fighting vehicles are the first to crush the panicking Sardegnians beneath their weight. This is soon followed by the heavy hooves of war horses, surprisingly. It's understandable when you come to learn that, despite their firepower and protection, armored vehicles have many blindspots in CQC engagement. As such, the Colonel directly leads the cavalry to rush the Sardegnians line alongside the tanks and armored cars. Having been hiding behind them for long enough, the cavalrymen will now fan out along the insertion point, taking care of enemy infantry in the open with their guns and melee weapons. While the tanks and armored cars keep dishing out bullet after bullet, the horse riders go in a tad more up close and personal.

While more sporadic than the sound of mounted machine guns firing, the booming of bolt-action rifles and submachine guns still carries a noticeable tone amidst the chaos of warfare. Despite the heavily rushed nature of the cavalry the Colonel employed, their experience in combat riding shone through. Riding their horses with an unwavering will, these riders accurately shoot or suppress targets further away while clashing their sabers and the sharp edges of their shovels against the unprotected bodies of the Sardegnians... Women and men alike. Yes, even now, some unfitted women have taken up arms against the Swedish, just because they have been killing the people they had shared a boat with for months. Unfortunately, they're untrained, scared, and fueled with nothing but their zeal and hatred. An easy composition to be dismantled by the tempo of the Swedish cavalry. At this point, as long as they are armed, they're hostiles that need to be taken down. If any survive, then it's either they're lucky or unfortunate to be so. Dead bodies fall everywhere in droves, either by numerous bullet holes or being slashed open. The red flowing from the corpses has turned the Sardegnian barricade into a wall of blood.

Once the immediate insertion point is clear, the riders reconvene back at the armored fighting vehicles, just in time for the truck-mounted infantry to disembark and form a secured perimeter. Some are obviously frazzled by the gruesome sight caused by the armored vehicles and cavalrymen, yet none dare to be distracted from their task. The Colonel rides up to them, passing down a general set of instructions.

"Infantry and armor are to divide into two wings, and flush out the harbor from two angles! Advance slowly and steadily, and be aware of desperate maneuvers by the Sardegnians. God knows what these depraved bastards would do! Cavalry, follow me! We need to silence those artillery pieces!"

Even if the Swedish have made it to the inner harbor, it doesn't mean that the Sardegnian howitzers have stopped firing. Weirdly enough, they have been dropping shell after shell at the Swedish encirclement around the harbor. Even with their subpar accuracy, the damage they have done can still be felt in many ways. Shutting them down for good is vital for the peace of Stockholm.

THIS CHAPTER UPLOAD FIRST AT NOVELBIN.COM